Gridless: Sustainable Bitcoin Mining

I was invited to tag along with a film crew heading to a Gridless facility in Kenya earlier this year. An exciting opportunity to see how Bitcoin mining leverages renewable energy and supports rural communities.

Two hours from Nairobi is a town with a mini-grid powered by hydroelectric energy. The river flowing downstream is captured by generators, converted into electricity, and powers the community. The community only utilizes a portion of the energy produced, resulting in a large surplus wasted. Additionally, the demand is constantly fluctuating: factories ramp up demand during the day, households require more in the evenings, and demand plummets at night.

This leaves the producer wasting energy that could be monetized otherwise. Enter Gridless! They use bitcoin miners to stabilize the mini-grid and smooth out energy demand. How? Any surplus energy at any given moment is directed to the bitcoin miners. If no surplus energy exists, the miners receive no power. The energy needs of the community come first!

If you don’t know what bitcoin miners are, a quick TLDR: they are machines that guess a combination of numbers to find a hash below a certain target value. Sound confusing? In simpler terms, the machines are rolling multiple dice, hoping for the right outcome. This results in a new block being added to the blockchain, and the miner is rewarded with bitcoin for their efforts.

Walking into the container filled with miners, you hear a loud buzzing noise similar to a large hornet’s nest. If you pay close attention, you’ll hear a symphony of miners turning on and off based on the energy available. Unlike traditional industrial systems that may require time to ramp up or down, bitcoin miners can be flipped on and off instantly. That means if only some energy is available, only some miners run. If more energy becomes available, more miners turn on.

A common misconception is that bitcoin uses too much energy. It consumes 0.21% of the world's energy production and 60% of it comes from renewable sources. This consumption increases the resilience and security of the network (an article for another day).

Gridless continues similar work around Africa to capture excess energy produced by renewable means and stabilize local grids with an extremely flexible solution. It ensures that the energy produced for local communities will never go to waste and can be monetized through bitcoin mining.